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miffed by her hogging seats, and Sofia buys coffees
from the man-with-a-van on the forecourt.
    ‘I was just telling Anna about yesterday,’ says Lou, her voice still hushed.
    ‘The hospital?’
    Lou nods.
    ‘It is good news, do you agree?’ Sofia says to Anna.
    ‘I suppose it is.’
    ‘At least it is not malignant.’
    Lou flushes, irritated: Sofia sounds blasé. Doesn’t she appreciate how upset I am? Lou thinks. Maybe she’s avoiding making too much fuss lest it alarm me further.
‘Still, I feel like a freak.’
    ‘How big is it, then?’ asks Anna.
    ‘About the size of a grapefruit.’
    ‘Blimey.’
    ‘Exactly. I’m a freak.’
    ‘You are not a freak,’ says Sofia.
    ‘If you’re a freak, I’m a freak,’ says Anna.
    Lou laughs. ‘I guess.’
    The train is filling up; a woman asks to sit beside Sofia. The three of them huddle across the table.
    ‘Anyway, they say I ought to consider having it removed.’ She lowers her tone still further.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because it’s so big, and it may well get even bigger. Who knows, if it’s grown to the size of a grapefruit already, it’ll be a blooming watermelon next . . . ’ Lou
shivers. ‘Then it’ll be trickier to operate on – and I’m told it’s not that easy as it is – but also if I want to have children, it could make it difficult to
get pregnant.’ The man across the aisle straightens out his broadsheet with a flick of his wrists. Lou could swear he is eavesdropping. She whispers, ‘It’s right in the middle of
my womb.’
    ‘I see,’ says Anna. ‘So, you want children then?’
    Lou glances up at Sofia. The subject is not one they’ve ever discussed in detail. She thought they had plenty of time to think about babies. They’ve been together less than a year,
are in the first flush of love.
    ‘I think so. And if I want to have them, I should have surgery, and then, apparently . . . ’ She pauses, aware this will be news to Sofia. ‘I read online last night that I
– um, well, we – shouldn’t hang about.’
    ‘And how about you, Sofia?’ asks Anna. Once more, that disarming frankness.
    Sofia hesitates, and Lou holds her breath while she waits for her answer.
    Finally she says, ‘To be honest, I don’t think I do.’
    *  *  *
    It must be coincidence, but when Sofia gets off the train at East Croydon, everywhere she looks there are mothers and babies. At the newsagent where she picks up Design
Week, there’s a woman with a pushchair at the counter. In the queue at M&S, as she waits to buy a sandwich for her lunch, there’s a customer with a tiny newborn in a papoose
strapped to her chest. There are even two women taking up the entire breadth of the pavement with their brood of thigh-high offspring, chatting in the street she cuts through to the office.
    It’s as if they have been put here to make me feel bad, she thinks.
    Sofia is doing her best to support Lou, but it’s so hard. She knows how tense Lou is about cancer; losing her father was devastating. Nevertheless, the conversation on the train alarmed
her. Becoming a parent is not something she’s had to focus on before, and it all seems very strange and very sudden.
    Before this, Sofia thinks, if Lou had asked how I felt about having a baby, I would have said it was not something I was going to do: not now, certainly; probably not ever. I don’t see it
as likely to happen – and lots of my gay friends feel the same, the men especially. It is not how we imagine ourselves. Perhaps if I was straight and had stayed in Spain, I could have fallen
into having children . . .
    But it was largely to escape from those pressures that brought Sofia to England in the first place. Finding a sperm donor, arranging insemination, answering everyone’s questions . . . The
childcare issues, the bullying a kid might experience at school, the financial burden . . . She shudders.
    It is a massive commitment.
    It’s not as if I don’t see myself with Lou long term though,